Podcasts for iOS remains hard to use after recent fixes

Even after the update, Podcasts keeps raking in record one-star reviews.

One month ago when we examined Apple's Podcasts application for iOS, we felt it wasn't fully baked. We did like the freedom from downloading that Podcasts' robust streaming feature provides. We also liked the simple access to podcasts downloaded through iTunes on the computer. But overall, the app just did not impress. And we're not the only ones who felt that way. Several other Apple iOS applications have ten times as many five-star compared to one-star ratings. But for Podcasts, this is very different: there are more than twice as many people awarding one star as there are giving out five stars.

But on Wednesday, Apple released an update to the Podcasts application. The main fixes mentioned on its page on the App Store are "significant improvements to performance and stability" and artwork-related improvements, leaving us here at Ars with some hope that the app had been vastly improved.

App Store ratings for Podcasts

Unfortunately, version 1.0.1 is not that update. Maybe Podcasts 1.0.1 really is faster than version 1.0, but it still takes a good ten seconds for the application to respond to touch when started on a freshly powered up iPhone 4. But once the app is running, it doesn't freeze for seconds at a time as much as the previous version. Podcasts crashed on me twice shortly after installing the update, but after removing that huge Skeptics Guide to the Universe feed with five year's worth of episodes in it, I didn't experience any more crashes. The app also seemed to return to responsiveness faster after getting distracted—presumably with updating the feeds in the background.

There is an upside, though. The artwork handling has indeed been improved: artwork is now visible for all my podcasts. And in Top Stations, when a podcast doesn't have artwork, its name is shown instead. I also like that in the playback screen, the artwork is now full size. Another small improvement is that it's now possible to swipe to delete undownloaded podcast episodes. However, there are still no mechanisms to mass-remove those after subscribing to a large feed, and they still don't disappear after playing an episode for feeds with "subscribe" set to "on." I did see a freshly played episode being autodeleted one time, but I couldn't replicate that behavior—for the most part, the autodeletion settings don't do anything. But at least for unsubscribed feeds, the episode titles are now removed when iTunes on the computer deletes an episode.

In the previous version, when telling Podcasts to stop playing when the current episode is finished, it would do so, but not before it had also marked the next one as played. It still moves the little "now playing" speaker icon to the next episode as before, but that episode is no longer marked as played. Last but not least, playback positions are now synchronized between Podcasts and the Music app—and by extension, iTunes on the computer. However, this is where the good news ends: once Podcasts finishes playing an episode, that episode reverts back to being unplayed in Music. It's the same thing, but the other way around.

Some remaining bugs are just plain weird. For instance, when reordering feeds, one got stuck halfway between two places in the list. No matter what I did, the feedlist remained in this inconsistent view. Only killing Podcasts through the task switcher and restarting it helped.

Podcasts 1.0.1's weird behavior

So what is a podcast fan to do?

It looks like at this point, Apple just did some bug hunting, as no changes were made to the application's user interface. Hopefully, Apple will implement some of our suggestions down the road. But for now, Podcasts requires a good deal of extra work from its users: if you sync with iTunes, you have to manually delete or mark episodes as played on the computer or in the Music app. If you don't sync with iTunes, you'll have to prune episode titles one by one. I do like how you can just fire up the app and it'll download new episodes for selected feeds in the background, and it lets you skip forward and backward easily. But several third party podcast players also have these features, and they tie the skipping to the previous/next controls on the lock screen and the headphone clicker.

So if you sync with iTunes, install Podcasts and use it when you encounter episodes that make you want to skip. Use the Music app for everything else. If you don't care about syncing with iTunes, at this point you're better off with a third-party podcast player. We can only hope that Apple squashes some more bugs, brings performance on par with the competition, and removes the need for manually managing podcast episodes later this summer. Otherwise, podcast fans could find themselves in a pickle when iOS 6 removes the podcast playback functionality from the built-in Music app.

Iljitsch van Beijnum / Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain.